AIP Podcast EP 68 - Private, Personalized, and Assistive AI with SmartR AI

This episode’s guest, Oliver Scott-King, CEO and Founder of SmartR AI, joins host Anne to explore how assistive AI is reshaping the future of work, wellbeing, and human–machine collaboration. From his early experiments with Palm Pilots to building cutting-edge behavioral intelligence systems, Oliver shares the journey behind Smartr AI’s mission to create private, safe, and personalized AI assistants. He explains how products like SCOTi and alertR combine emotion detection, contextual reasoning, and data synthesis to enhance decision-making across industries—from enterprise productivity to health and wellness. Oliver also unpacks the challenges of earning user trust, the importance of secure deployment environments, and how SmartR AI builds domain-specific models that empower people without replacing them. Tune in to discover how assistive AI, done the SmartR AI way, unlocks meaningful impact through ethical, human-centric innovation.

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The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

The world of large systems engineering has been dominated by the world's largest companies and are at the forefront of adopting new ways of working and the technologies that enable them. In today's episode, we are joined by Oliver King Smith, whose career has taken him from palm pilots to jet engines and is now trying to crack the code on assistive AI for large systems engineering companies. Hello and welcome back to yet another episode of the AIP podcast with your host Anne Chang on behalf of the AI Partnerships Corps. Today joining me is a mathematician, extraordinaire, excellent founder and now AI assistive AI practitioner, Oliver K. Smith. Now Oliver is the founder of SmarterAI, which is based out in Scotland, UK, and discussing the role of assistive AI in the engineering and manufacturing industries globally. Oliver, welcome to our show.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

And thank you so much for having me on today.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

It's great to have you here. Let's kick it off with your backstory. Tell us a little bit about your career and what led you to founding Smarter AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Well, my background is I did a PhD in mathematics and then entered into the world of scientific software, statistics, and then into consumer software, where I worked on things like uh the big games and that kind of stuff in the 90s. But it wasn't really until I quit that and started my own company that I really get into engineering. And I think I found my tribe once I got into engineering, and I've been engineering ever since, working with big companies and startups, always in the embedded hardware and software world. And I've really enjoyed doing that and finally felt that there was a need to do AI in that particular world. And that's how I got going with AI and engineering and love that whole systems engineering.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

That's amazing. Tell us a little bit about Smarter AI and what problem are you really solving for?

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yeah, so when I started Smarter, I really felt there was a need, as I said, for engineering companies to be able to use AI. I had discovered that AI could be used to help solve problems when I was working with Toyota on a personal mobility device for blind people. And so with that, I tried to get a couple of big engineering companies to allow me to start AI divisions unsuccessfully. And so in 2020, I decided I'll just start my own AI company and really focus on trying to solve interesting problems using AI.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

That's amazing. But you know, in the world of engineering or manufacturing, most companies buy what they can see, hold, and touch. And AI is generally a concept that is so foreign to so many companies. How do you drive greater education in such an industry?

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Yeah, that's a really great question. And it's definitely something that I think lots of people are spending lots of time trying to do. So what we do is we try to speak on podcasts such as this, and we speak at conferences, and we publish a lot of articles and interesting blog content just on our website where we talk about AI, what it's good for, what it's not good for, some of the ethical concerns, some of the legal concerns. So we really try to spend a fair amount of time educating the market. What is AI? What can you do with it, and how should you use it?

SPEAKER_01 3:43

That's amazing. You know, one of the things you talked about in our pre-show call was that AI should be assistive rather than disruptive. Tell us a little bit more, could you maybe elaborate about this concept?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah, absolutely. Um we think of AI as assistive intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence. And the reason we think that is because it when you look at what AI is good at doing, it's really fantastic at solving certain problems. For example, it can look for patterns in very high-dimensional data, or it can ask endless amounts of questions over and over and over again. Now, humans can do both these things, but they're not, you know, we're not very good at it. You know, if you ask the same questions over and over again, you get bored, you get burnout, you may miss something. Or if you're looking for those data in these large data sets, it can take days, weeks, months to find the answer. But what humans are really good at doing is seeing the pattern and saying that makes no sense whatsoever, or seeing a pattern the AI has found and saying, oh, now that's interesting. I wonder what's causing that. Let me dig in further. So that natural inquisitiveness and the knowing how to ask right questions really is something we're fantastic at doing, and AI can't do. So when you combine the two together, what AI is good at and what we're good at, you get something magical. You get something that's better than each individual part. And that's why we try to get people to think of AI as assistive intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

That's super cool. You know, the the world is evolving so rapidly right now. How would a manufacturer or engineering company adopt technologies like artificial intelligence and the like?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Yeah, so it could be quite difficult for them to do that. You really need to get some leadership, some courage at the top of the organization saying we should start looking at this. Now, one of the things that's really cool about AI is you don't need to rip out everything you're doing and say we're gonna start over and we're gonna use AI. You can bring it in incrementally and you can start figuring out what works for you, what doesn't work for you. And that process, though, is is important to start soon because if you don't, your competitors are gonna get ahead of you and they're gonna figure out how to use AI much more effectively than you will, and they'll start getting new ideas about how can I apply this technology, how can I solve this problem. So you really want to start and actually just kind of get your feet wet and understand how you can use this technology in your business.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

That's definitely good advice. Well, I think we should talk a little bit about what you think uh you think um is on the horizon for artificial intelligence and new technologies moving forward.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Yeah, that's that's always hard to predict because AI is very, very fluid. Um, you know, it's new inventions are coming out all the time in the field, and so it changes extremely rapidly. But the way I like people to think about it is the AI is a lot like the steam engine was. With the steam engine, it revolutionized the world. Before the steam engine, pretty much everyone lived on farms or in little villages around farms, and after the steam engine came out and the industrial revolution happened because of it, you now ended up with almost everyone living in cities in Europe, at least, and and very few people living on the farm. I think AI's that big a change. It's it's and like the steam engine, we don't quite understand it. You know, Kernel didn't figure out thermodynamics until quite a few decades after the steam engine had been around. Likewise, we're still trying to figure out exactly how AI works. So very similar parallels, and you really just got to kind of get in there and start figuring out how do I apply it to my business? How do I make my business better with this kind of technological transformation?

SPEAKER_01 7:52

That's brilliant. Well, thank you, Oliver. That's all the time we do have for today's episode. It was really good to have you on our show today. To our listeners, if you have enjoyed our show today, don't forget to give us a like, share, and follow. You know it means the world to us. And once again, my name is Ann Cheng, and my guest today is Oliver King Smith from Smarter AI, and you've been listening to the AIP podcast brought to you by the AI Partnerships Corps. Until next time.